Alice Sharpe

"Proud to write for Mills & Boon"

Alice's top writing themes

The body

10

Cars and road trips

8

Elements of time

8

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About Alice

I was born in Sacramento, California. As a child, I wrote plays for the neighbour kids and invited their parents to performances. As I got older, I started my own family newspaper, handwritten and hand delivered, for the extortionate price of 25 cents. Eventually, I moved into writing angst-ridden poems and journals – lots of them. Right after graduating from high school, I married the love of my life whom I met while walking on a beach in Northern California. We had two children, spent years building a house, juggling pets and living on sailboats. All the while, I wrote stories.

When the kids started Junior High, I started marketing my writing. When my short stories were turned down by mainstream women's magazines, my mother suggested I try a confession magazine. I sold my first story to them within two weeks. What a feeling of accomplishment! I walked on air for about a week! It took me almost two years to sell my next story, but after that, I went on to sell over two dozen of them to various confession magazines. The experience of learning to get a story off the ground within a sentence or two was invaluable as was the connection I made with one of the editors. When she moved to a small book publisher, I sent her a completed manuscript which she bought. I wrote twenty books for her, mostly romances with a few mysteries thrown in. During this time, I learned about pacing, plot development and characterisation. There is nothing a writer can do to improve their craft that trumps the actual sitting of oneself in a chair and writing. Eventually I sold a manuscript to Mills and Boon.

I also still married to the love of my life and our two children have given us three wonderful grandchildren.